Closing film reflects politics and personal choice

Editor's Note: Sarasota Film Festival organizers learned after publication of this article that George Hamilton would be unable to attend Saturday night's screening of "The Congressman." Treat Williams and Robert Mrazek will still be in attendance.

Robert Mrazek was into his second term as a Democratic Congressman from a 2-to-1 Republican district on Long Island, working seven days a week and suffering the consequent ill effects on his family life, when he complained to a colleague, “I wish the phone wouldn’t ring so often.”

Former Congressman turned writer, Robert Mrazek

“I know a place where they have one phone for the whole island,” his friend said.

The conversation ultimately resulted in Mrazek purchasing a home on Monhegan, a retreat off the coast of Maine long known as the “artists’ island” for once having provided inspiration and a summer home to, among others, Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. Monehegan is the place where Mrazek retreated to return to his “first love” – writing – after serving 17 years in the House. It is also where he wrote nine books and scripted and shot “The Congressman,” his first screenplay to be produced, selected as the closing night film of the 2016 Sarasota Film Festival.

“I was inspired by the people that lived there, who were very self-reliant,” says Mrazek, 70. “They didn’t all like one another, but they all pulled together. I was sitting there in my writing lair in the fall of 2012 and thought of the contrast between my life on the island and my life in Washington and what it has become, a place of great cynicism and ugly partisanship, which wasn’t true when I was there. I really set about to write a screen play that contrasted those two ways of life and also one that examined something I’m very concerned about, the erosion of individual freedom and freedom of expression.”

“The Congressman” is the story of a disgruntled Maine Congressman, Charlie Winship (played by Treat Williams), facing media denunciation and public scorn after being caught on video failing to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. As the controversy spirals out of control, Charlie retreats to a remote island whose eccentric inhabitants are in a battle over their fishing grounds, where he undergoes a change in perspective and purpose.

SFF Program Director Michael Dunaway calls it “kind of a perfect movie for this year, given the media circus going on with the Presidential campaigns.” Mrazek, an optimist by nature who views today’s political landscape with a degree of despair, agrees.

“It couldn’t be more timely in terms of what we’re looking at right now in the political structure of our country and the inability of the two major political parties to work together to find common ground,” says Mrazek, who still remembers the excitement and sense of hope he felt as a 15-year-old when John F. Kennedy, was elected. “It’s terribly discouraging and the tenor of this campaign is, to me, almost unprecedented and really bizarre. At the same time, the film is a small antidote to some of the poison being spewed. It’s a very positive film.”

The script, which is not Mrazek’s first – a bigger budget Vietnam era film is currently being developed by legendary film producer Fred Roos – is not strictly autobiographical, but it “definitely” draws on Mrzaek’s own life and political experiences. Moreover, it was shot, in part, on Monhegan, the very beautiful and remote island 12 miles into the Atlantic where Mrzaek does a good deal of his writing.

Treat Williams was immediately attracted to the role of Charlie Winship because it offered a character forced to go through a transformation, something the actor says he looks for in any script. While he agrees that it “does examine the kind of nationalism I’m seeing rising up right now in the political climate,” he doesn’t see it as a political drama, which someone recently called it on Twitter. Instead he sees it as “the little movie that could.”

"The Congressman" was shot, in part on a remote island off the coast of Maine where former Congressman Robert Mrazek has a home. / Photo courtesy SFF

“It’s ‘a little comedy with a big heart,’” Williams Tweeted back. “It is not a political drama. We have enough of that right now.”

Williams, who experienced a transitional moment in his own career about a decade ago, also connected with the character of Charlie Winship on a personal level.

Faced with the threat of an actor’s strike in the early ‘90s and finding himself forced to take roles in action films or horror movies instead of the meaningful, dramatic roles of his earlier career in order to keep his two children in college, Williams hit his own wall of frustration.

“Charlie is a man examining what he’s doing banging his head against the wall and I have done the same thing for the last 10 years,” he says. “There’s something in most American movies that says you have to keep fighting and this is a movie about a guy that says, ‘I don’t know about that.’ Who says, ‘Maybe if I just life my life the best I can for myself, that will be a better thing for the universe.”

Ultimately, Williams decided to move to a farm in Vermont that had been his family’s summer retreat, return to live theater, work on playwriting and make segue into television work in New York. As a consequence, the 64-year-old actor says he has “never been happier.”

Treat Williams, best known for his role as Berger in the film "Hair," found a connection to his own life in playing Charlie Winship, the beleaguered Congressman in Robert Mrazek's "The Congressman."

“I was able to say to myself, you can reboot this career if you choose what you want to do and regain control of it,” says Williams. “That’s what I’m doing now and I feel as though for the first time, at the age of 64, I’m in total control of at least my ability to say no. So just as Charlie Winship was forced to go to this island, I was forced to go to my home in Vermont and given an opportunity to examine what is meaningful to me and gives me peace. That’s what we all have to find, the peace in our lives, with the universe and with what’s happening politically in this country.”

Which is not say Williams, who campaigned for President Obama and worked for many years with Bobby Kennedy, Jr. on a Long Island Sound water project, has retreated entirely from political subjects. In addition to “The Congressman,” he stars as Ted Kennedy in an upcoming HBO movie called “Confirmation,” a re-telling of the contentious confirmation process of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the early ‘90s. He is also at work, in his own writing room in Vermont, on a play about Ulysses S. Grant.

Williams was ultimately so pleased with “The Congressman” that he signed on to become a producer on the film. He ranks Charlie Winship’s final speech, the pinnacle of the movie, as “one of the most beautiful pieces of literature I’ve ever been given to do” and says his own work in the film ranks with the most meaningful of his career, including his break-through role as Berger in the film version of “Hair.”

George Hamilton plays a lobbyist in "The Congressman," the closing night film of the 2016 Sarasota Film Festival.

“It’s about loyalty, it’s about second chances, it’s about betrayal and forgiveness, which sound like very high-fallutin themes, but it’s done with a very light touch,” he says. “It’s a movie I’m very, very proud of.”

Williams and Mrazek will be in Sarasota for Saturday night’s screening. They will also participate in a conversation about “The Congressman” at Florida Studio Theatre’s Court Cabaret at 4 p.m. Saturday.

1137 Party, 11:37 p.m. – 2 a.m. April 9 at World of Beer, 1888 Main St. $35-$30; limited availability.

SFF Screenings continue through April 10 at the Regal Hollywood 20, 1993 Main St., where the SFF box office is located. Tickets also at 366-6200 and www.sarasotafilmfestival.com

Carrie Seidman

Carrie Seidman has been a newspaper features writer, columnist and reviewer for 30 years...and a dancer for longer than that. She has a master's degree from Columbia University Journalism School and is a former competitive ballroom dancer. Contact her via email, or at (941) 361-4834.
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Last modified: April 8, 2016
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